A new excel workbook contains _____ worksheet(s) by default, but additional worksheets can be added.

This post applies to the following versions of Excel: Excel 2003, Excel 2007 & Excel 2010

Excel workbooks contain individual worksheets and the number of worksheets in a workbook is limited only by the system memory of your computer. This article is all about the names you can give to a worksheet.

Naming Syntax

By default, a new workbook contains 3 worksheets and they are named; Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet3. You can add new worksheets and clone existing ones and all the worksheets can be renamed. There are however a few rules when naming worksheets.

1. The name must be unique within a single workbook.
2. A worksheet name cannot exceed 31 characters.
3. You can use all alphanumeric characters but not the following special characters:
   \ , / , * , ? , : , [ , ].
4. You can use spaces, underscores (_) and periods (.) in the name as word separators.

However, just because Excel lets you use certain characters, I would strongly recommend against using most special characters including spaces. Why? Because, when you use characters such as Spaces, Dollars ($), Exclamation Marks (!) etc, Excel will wrap the worksheet name in single quotes. E.g.

=’Hello World’!A5

Many people use spaces as a word separator in Excel but a Space will also cause Excel to add the single quotes. Compare the worksheet name above with the following worksheet name:

=Hello_World!A5

It is also possible to use a space as the first or last character of a worksheet name. This is dangerous as users do not expect it and often can’t see it. For this reason, I recommend avoiding all spaces in when naming worksheets. Furthermore, as other special characters also cause Excel to add the single quotes, it is best that these are also avoided and then, if you ever see single quotes in formulas referring to worksheets, then you will immediately see it as a warning sign.

Why are the quotes a problem? Well, it makes it hard to type the names of worksheets in Excel, they make the formulas longer and harder to read and lend themselves to errors. It is cleaner and more reliable to avoid them.

Numbers. It is alright to use numbers in the name of a worksheet as long as the name doesn’t start or end with a number as this will also cause Excel to add the single quotes. For example:

Note: there are no quote marks in the last formula listed above.There are exceptions to this illustrated by the example below where the name actually ends with a number ans still has no quote marks.

BalanceSheet2011 → =BalanceSheet2011!A5

This is caused because of the way Excel validates names. For some reason, with certain characters such as numbers, after a certain number of characters, it stops checking to see if it needs to add single quotes. This is a bizarre phenomenon which may not continue in future versions of Excel. Hence it is best to stick to the rules to avoid problems in the future.

In summary, it is safe to use all alphanumeric characters and underscores (_) or periods (.) as word separators.

Use of Capitals

I recommend that all worksheets are named with at least one capital letter. This is because Excel does not differentiate between lowercase and uppercase but will convert the characters of any name you type in a formula to match the case that the actual worksheet name uses. The following table will illustrate this.

The benefit is this: when you type a name in lowercase, if Excel recognises it, the name will be automatically changed to match the capitalisation used by the worksheet. This helps to validate the name as you type. If you misspell it or type in a name that does not exist, Excel will not match it and the letters will not be capitalised.

Word Separators

This warrants some further comments which are mirrored in my post Defined Names: Naming Conventions (Part 1).

When creating descriptive names that contain more than one word, a separator should be used. For reasons given above, Spaces should be avoided.

1. First letter capitalisation: Join the words together but Capitalise the first letter of each word e.g. BalanceSheet. This is clean and easy to read and is my preferred method. It does not add unnecessary extra length and is clear to read.
2. Use of an underscore (_): Separating words with an underscore works well as shown by these examples: balance_sheet, Balance_Sheet or BALANCE_SHEET. However, the underscore does add unnecessary length to the name and makes it hard to differentiate the main part of the name from the Prefix (see section below).
3. Use of a period (.): Separating words with a period is clean as shown by these examples: total.revenue, Total.Revenue or TOTAL.REVENUE. However, periods are used in many places in Excel especially in numbers, web addresses and general text so I prefer to avoid them in Worksheet names.

Prefixes

If I have more than around 9 worksheets in my workbook, I tend to use a grouping code in the worksheet name. E.g. I may have a workbook that is a company financial model. It will have an Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow and Summary, but it will probably have a bunch of other sheets that have been used to generate the data used in these financial sheets. In this case, I will probably prefix the names of the four financial worksheets with something like FS ie.

FS_IncomeStatement FS_BalanceSheet FS_CashFlow

FS_Summary

We may need to insert a new worksheet to enter something very quickly when you are working. So, in those cases, our shortcut key is important to quickly have a new worksheet in place. Can we include all the information or data in a single worksheet itself? Answers are almost 99.99% of the time “No” only because data may contain multiple details that need to be stored in multiple worksheets of the workbook. So, keep in mind the importance of having a new sheet. This article will teach you the shortcut keys to insert new sheets in Excel.

How to Insert New Excel Worksheet?

We do not know whether you have noticed or not. But, by default, when we open the new workbook, we will have three worksheets in place “Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3.”

However, we can modify this default setting. However, that is a different topic altogether. You can refer to our article on “Insert New Worksheet” to have detailed information. So, let us get back to this topic, “Excel Shortcut New Sheet.”

Inserting a new worksheet is often required while working in Excel, so we can insert excel worksheet in excelTo add a new worksheet, go to the bottom of the screen and press the '+' button. You can also navigate to 'Home', 'Insert,' and then 'Insert Sheet' to add a new sheet.read more using multiple ways.

#1 – New Excel Worksheet Shortcut Using Manual Process

Follow the below steps to add a new Excel worksheet manually.

1. We need to right-click on any existing worksheets to insert a new worksheet.

   
   

2. When we right-click on the worksheet, we see the option “Insert.” If we click on this, it will open the dialog below.

   
   

3. From the above, choose “Worksheet,” and we will have the new worksheet in place.

   
   

   
   We have noticed that when the new sheet is inserted, it will push the existing worksheet to the right, and the new sheet becomes the active sheet.

There is also another manual way of inserting a new worksheet, which will be easier than the above method.

We must go to the “HOME” tab in the ribbon and choose the “Insert” button under the “HOME” tab.

Now, select the “Insert Sheet” option. As a result, it will insert the new worksheet by pushing the active worksheet to the right side and acquiring the position of the active sheet.

#2 – Insert New Excel Sheet by Using Shortcut Key

The manual steps are time-consuming and frustrating, but we can quickly insert new worksheets using shortcut keys. For example, below is the shortcut key to insert a new sheet in the Excel workbook.

Shortcut key to Insert New Sheet:

We need to hold the “SHIFT” key and press the “F11” function key to insert a new sheet in the existing Excel workbook.

• If we press the “F11” key by holding the “SHIFT” key, it will keep inserting the new worksheets in the serial order of the worksheet. For example, look at the below existing worksheet in Excel.

We have worksheets named “Sheet 1, Sheet 2, Sheet 3, and Sheet 4.” The active sheet is “Sheet 1.“

• Now, we will press “Shift + F11” and see the position of the new worksheet and its name.

The new worksheet position is to the left of the active sheet, and the new sheet name is incremental to the last worksheet name.

• For example, the last worksheet name was “Sheet 4.” When we inserted the new worksheet, it became “Sheet 5.”

• Now, we will delete the worksheet “Sheet 5.”

• Again, we will insert the new sheet using the shortcut key “Shift + F11.”

Now, look at the worksheet name. Instead of getting “Sheet 5” as the new worksheet name, we have obtained “Sheet 6“. We have already inserted “Sheet 5” and deleted it, so Excel counts how many worksheets are inserted.

Replica of Existing Sheet as New Sheet by Using Shortcut

We may need to create a new worksheet to have the existing data in the new worksheet in many cases. If we follow the process of inserting a new worksheet and then copying the data to a new worksheet, we will show you new techniques.

• For example, look at the below data in Excel.

• In “Sheet 2,” we have the below data. Now, we need the same data in a new worksheet.

• So, in the new technique, we need to hold the Ctrl key and drag the worksheet to the right side. While dragging, we may see a small “PLUS” icon appear.

• The moment we place our cursor outside the sheet, release the “Ctrl” key and release mouse holding. It will create a new worksheet.

Like this, we can create a new sheet in excel using shortcut keysAn Excel shortcut is a technique of performing a manual task in a quicker way.read more.

Things to Remember Here

• The “SHIFT + F11” key is the shortcut key to insert a new worksheet.
• We can use the “Ctrl + Drag” keys. It can create a replica of the existing worksheet, and the only changes are the sheet name.

Recommended Articles

This article has been a guide to Excel New Sheet Shortcut. Here, we discuss two ways to insert a new Excel worksheet using the shortcut keys (Shift + 11) and practical examples and a downloadable Excel template. You may learn more about Excel from the following articles: –